I assumed that Flint’s Treasure Island death was just a rumor is Black Sails-verse, just because tonally it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And Jack Rackham’s whole ending monologue is about how stories diverge from fact over time, which allows for wiggle room between the show and book.

comtessedebussy:

Listen the heartbreaking thing is that Treasure Island is James Flint’s greatest fear. He says in the absolutely iconic Freedom in the Dark speech that I am still not over

“We will have been for nothing. Defined by their histories distorted to fit into their narrative until all that is left of us are the monsters in the stories they tell their children.”

And that is what happens. That is what Treasure Island is: the definitive pirate story, in which Captain Flint is nothing more but a monster. A novel that almost every child reads….Flint literally becomes a monster in the stories they tell their children. A man who tried to change things, to destroy the myth of the inevitability of empire, to remake the new world…becomes a monster in that empire’s stories. 

Well great, anon, now I’m crying. 

I mean, the entirety of Black Sails is about stories. The irony is that the reason James is so effective as Flint is precisely because of the myth he himself creates around Flint – and yet in that myth, he is the monster. He has to be, that’s the only way that myth retains power. That label plagues him, as John Silver points out to him (John Silver, conveniently, is “not int he least bothered by whatever labels anyone decides to afix to you.” This doesn’t change – his “I don’t care” in response to Flint’s speech in 4×10 is literally the same sentiment). Part of what makes the war/rebellion so effective is the story of Long John Silver that Billy comes up with. Jack is absolutely obsessed with the reputation he’ll have and the stories they’ll tell about him – seriously, it’s a running gag, and when he goes to Philadelphia he realizes just how much those stories get twisted. 

The thing is, queer people have always struggled to tell their own stories, from their perspective. Stories in which they’re not monsters or predators, in which they aren’t insane or diseased or wrong or perverted. Stories in which they don’t die. Stories of their lives as they are. I could come up with dozens of examples. The way that queer people are told “don’t shove it in our faces” while the media is covered with heterosexuality. The way that an entire generation of queer people was lost to the AIDS crisis because the government completely ignored it – and their lives and their stories and their experiences create a glaring gap. The way that Forster’s novel about two gay men who get a happy ending, Maurice, couldn’t be published until after his death, in the 1970s, even though it was written in 1914. The way that the queer character always dies, or the queer couple never gets a happy ending in the media, with very few exceptions. The way that queerness is coded as monstrous in horror cinema. I mean, I could go on for a while here. 

Flint, in his “Freedom in the Dark” speech, is talking about exactly that. He is a queer man who is fighting for (among other things, including, yes, revenge fueled by rage) the right to be who he is without shame, who implores John Silver to not go down in history as a monster – and John Silver, who is, as far as I can tell, a straight man, looks him in the eyes and says “I don’t care.” Another queer story is erased, told in such a way as to profit those in power. 

In a way, then, since Black Sails is the prequel to Treasure Island, I suppose John Silver’s choice was predictable (though hindsight is 20/20).  Treasure Island is the story that we’re left with about what happened, and the finale tells us how that story came about. 

So yes, Treasure Island is absolutely fake news and untrue and not what actually happened, but on a kind of meta-level, that very fact is still super important, because the story that gets left behind, even if it’s not actual fact, is important. You could say the whole story of Black Sails is the tragedy of queer stories being erased, of Black Sails being transformed into Treasure Island by those who wield power. And those stories have power – even if they’re not true, they affect things. They change things. James Flint knows this, and that is why he is so scared of going down as a monster in their stories.